Welcome

Welcome to my wargaming blog,
I'm Dave and live in Morpeth, Northumberland in the UK.
This may or may not be a regular thing, we'll just have to see how it goes.

I am a painter/collector of figures first and a wargamer second. My thrill in this great hobby of ours is to place that final well researched & painted unit into the cabinet. The actual gaming with the figures is an important but secondary experience, we all like to win, but it isn't the be all and end all of it, being with good friends and having fun is.
Hope you will enjoy reading this blog as much as I will writing in it.
Just to remind the visitor to scroll down the various pages and click on 'older posts' to see more.
Dave.

Saturday 3 May 2014

Quality test for goodness sake!

Don't usually post as often as this but I'm bloody anoyed.
Got some figures out that I'm painting for one of the lads at the club, medieval, one lot Front Rank, I don't mind this manufacturer for WSS Seven years war and at a push Naps but their medieval are too regimented (formal if you like) and the other Claymore Castings. I have never painted these before and truthfully there not bad, not the best but I've seen allot worse.
Then I came to fit the separate weapons (halberds/pole arms). Now don't get me wrong, I'm quite prepared to take flash off figures, shave a bit off the inside of hands etc to get the weapons to fit, but when you pick up a figure you expect the sculpture/designer to have made some kind of effort to align the hands/arms positions so that you don't have to practically redesign the bloody thing yourself.
As you will see from the pictures below with a couple of figures I had to take great chunks out of hips, legs, manipulate hands and failing that bending the shaft of the weapon till it ended up looking as if the guy had chopped off a gnarly branch from a tree and stuck a blade on the end!
What the hell is going on here, when a manufacturer gets the original sculpture back from the designer surely the manufacturer puts various weapons in the figures hands to find out if the product that he has just paid the designer a deal of money for can actually get the weapon into the figures hands. I presume that in this particular instance the manufacturer has either not bothered his arse to do this, or has done so, found nothing lines up and has said fuck the buyer (you, me, whoever) let him do all the work!
What should have been a ten minute cleaning up job turned out to take forty five minutes out of my life.
 You can see the hip replacement operation carried out on this guy to get the shaft of the pole arm to fit.



 Couldn't get this weapon any lower, I would have had to take off half of his leg. No body would have carried a pole arm as high up as this.


As you can see the sculptor has designed this guys right hand to take the weapon at this angle, note how far away from lining up with the left (higher) hand. The only way of solving this was the gnarly stick look mentioned above.


This is a poor show by this manufacturer. I mentioned their name above but won't do so again, nor would I put this on any other wargames site, this is my blog and I will (within reason) put on what I want and I wouldn't want his business to suffer in any way because of anything I did (not that I would have any impact on what other people would do) but I have no time for incompetence or laziness, shame as the sculptings themselves aren't bad.
When I get them painted up I'll put them on here.
Dave.


6 comments:

  1. Dave I was thinking of dropping a few quid on Claymore for some of their Islemen types- . Not sure I will after that lot . Part of the problem is I suspect that the "manufacturer" actually dosen't make them but uses a casting service and so gets lots of bags of casting and then simply packs them

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  2. Still though mate, if I (and I know you would) were selling an item I'd make sure it was fit for purpose, it's the their company name/reputation on the line after all, most people wouldn't know or care who the sculptor was.
    Dave.

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  3. Hi Dave sorry to see you have had so much trouble with our figures. I haven't had this much trouble myself with fitting the weapons. You are most welcome to your thoughts. We do however get lots of good feedback on our figures and will take this one on the chin. Best of luck painting them.
    Dave Imrie

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    Replies
    1. Well Dave it's appreciated that you have come on here and say your piece. As I said in the blog I would not put this criticism on a wider forum or the like, I'm not here to hit anyone's sales, life is hard enough without that but I speak as I find.
      All other aspects of the figures are good and all the best with the range, I have and will continue to buy standards from Flags of War as I'm replacing the hand painted standards in my Otterburn collection and re-basing them on Impetus type bases (god help me more re-basing!).
      Again thanks for posting on here and do keep watching, your always welcome.
      Dave.

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  4. Hi Dave,

    Just letting you know I've nominated you for a Liebster Award here:
    http://canisterandgrape.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/weve-been-liebstered.html

    Cheers,
    Millsy

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  5. Don't know what it is but cheers Millsy!
    Dave

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